Scalded

As you probably haven't surmised from my too-clever-for-its-own-good title, I have been burned by Steam's summer sale, which I was excitedly raving about in just the last post. Now here I am, a week later (plus shipping and handling) and I find myself with about 70 fewer dollars, and about 20 more games, suspiciously few of which I am actually excited to play. Not included in that amount of dollars is the controller that I still need to purchase if I wish to play some of these games effectively. And on top of that, I need to buy Shin Megami Tensei IV for the sole purpose of registering it and Fire Emblem Awakening so I can get a $30 credit with which to buy Fire Emblem DLC And I guess I'll talk about it now? Is that what I do here? Jesus Christ

I've only played a small handful of the games I've purchased, and maybe a small fingerful of them have been played for any real length of time. Despite this, I think I already know enough to declare Recettear 2013's Steam Summer Sale MVP. As I briefly mentioned in the previous post, it is a game about running an item shop. The main character, Recette, is the result of a genetic experiment, conducted by The Professor from Nichijou to create a being even more cute than herself.

It was a landmark study in the correlation between ties and cuteness.

Well... while searching that picture, I noticed that one of the autocomplete options for "Recettear" was "Recettear 34". (This refers to the infamous "Rule 34 of the Internet", which states that there is porn of it. No exceptions) Needless to say, I found this stupendously distasteful. Then, when I searched, I saw it. It was there. In the top left corner of the screen, it showed images for "Recettear 34". So, when you see that image, just know that it was purchased with my soul.

Recette's father takes out a loan of almost one million Pix, (The currency used in the game) with the house as collateral, then disappears to go adventuring. A fairy named Tear shows up to collect on the loan, and Recette is forced to open up an item shop to pay off the debt, or else live in a box on the street. Recette, hilariously misunderstanding her relationship to this loan shark, names her shop a portmanteau of their two names that sounds an awful lot like "Racketeer". You buy low, sell high, and rent out thugs for paltry sums to kill stuff on your behalf, while making off with all the loot. Standard business stuff, really.

Recettear is by no means a perfect game. Sometimes I question whether or not it is even a good game. But it is certainly a fun game, a distinction I first appreciated upon answering the question "Is 999 a fun game?" with "Well, it's a good game". And to top it all off, it has a soundtrack that, while not terribly varied or complex, is quite excellent. All in all, getting 50 hours of gameplay out of $5 is a pretty impressive feat of shopping savvy, in my book.

The only other game I've really played too extensively is Cave Story+, which is different from Cave Story, because I paid money for it. It is, without a doubt, the best freeware game I have ever paid money to play. It's a retro style platformer-shooter reminiscent of the SNES era, and it was entirely made by one man, who goes by the pseudonym "Pixel", which is appropriate, because he would probably be made of money if he charged anything for this game. Actually, he might still be, considering all the paid versions that have been released.

This game has a character named Curly. Curly Brace. I think we're done here. And to make matters better, the game is abbreviated as "CS", which often stands for "Computer Science", which is a branch that uses curly braces. So if you're in the mood for a fun game with no cost to you, feel free to click here.

If, for some reason, that wasn't enough to convince you, I guess I could talk about the gameplay or whatever. Though I feel I should warn that this is easily one of the most frustrating games I've ever played, and I've played a lot of Mario Parties. Getting the true end without a walkthrough is damn near impossible. Not that I'd want to. The ending I got was harder than a diamond encrusted carbon nanotube, and I wasn't even playing on the most difficult setting. And if the true ending is any harder, (It absolutely is) then it would be harder than... look, I'm running out of comparisons here, but I just want to impart to you that it would be very, very hard.

As you might guess from the name, the game does have a story, and it's pretty good. It also has music, and it is some of the best, made all the more impressive by the fact that it was also all made by Pixel. It's also available for free, legal(?) download on the same website where you can download the game, so that's a pretty groovy thing.

The final game that I've finished, entirely in the time between starting this post and finishing it, is The Walking Dead. In general, one plays a zombie game with the expectation of gameplay that centers around killing zombies. The Walking Dead bravely subverts this expectation, with gameplay that consists mostly of watching people die and then feeling bad about it. It's like someone's attempt to make the Catholic Church into a video game. (DISCLAIMER: I go to a Catholic school, and I know about as much about Catholicism, and religion as a whole, as I do about writing concisely. If nothing else, it garnered a "x'D" out of my content manager, so feel free to blame her for any offense) The game is entirely unrelated to Cave Story, despite the similarity in mechanics. {Spoilers?}

Trust me, there's a joke to be found somewhere in all this.

 As Payton Knobeloch already said, The Walking Dead is a game about story, about slow pacing punctuated by frantic button-mashing, about losing everything you hold dear, and wondering why you don't even have enough left in you to hate the person who took it from you. Is it a fun game? Well... it's certainly a good game, perhaps making it a nice foil to Recettear up there. It is, more or less, a visual novel or adventure game, and as anyone who has read some of my earlier work can attest, I eat that shit up. So if you want a story-driven experience with interesting characters and choices, similar to the Zero Escape series, but are for some reason unwilling to play Japanese games, (At this point I'd like to give a shout-out to a man that I am arbitrarily referring to as "Bong Hardeners") then check it out.

And then there's Fez. I have... complicated feelings about Fez. After several days of my sister egging me on to play it, simply by virtue of the fact that fezzes are cool, (It seems she shares my love of references, for better or for worse) I played it, and I wasn't terribly impressed. Now, I wouldn't really say that Fez isn't a good game, but I'm not sure that I could say, in good conscience, that it is a fun game. Fez is a game about a 2D character who flips dimensions around to solve puzzles, in a way that sounds similar to Super Paper Mario, but is really quite different. And when it works, the gameplay is fantastic. The way that it defies our understanding of a three-dimensional space is pretty cool. That said, all the puzzles seemed to either have a difficulty of "just keep flipping stuff around, and you'll get it eventually" or "I'm quite convinced that, with the right tools, I could prove this to be mathematically impossible.", with nothing in between. It might be that I'm just too stupid to appreciate its genius, but I thought that it was just a pretty good game, not worthy of all the hype I heard. Then again, I still haven't finished it, and likely won't for awhile, so keep that in mind.

But the part of Fez that really whips my cream is the soundtrack. Now, you'll probably never catch me saying that a game has a bad soundtrack, but for some reason, it seems like every source I've seen is praising Fez to high heaven for its beautiful music. And yet, when I actually played the game, I noticed that I was spending a lot of time listening to nothing but the occasional sound of Gomez falling to his death. Well, maybe a bit more than occasional. The point is that, while you could say that the silence is an artistic choice meant to represent Gomez's loneliness and confusion, that doesn't make it a good soundtrack. And when there was music, it was often far from what I'd call "Listenin' Music" (I don't believe in the letter g). It mostly felt like ambient sound, meant to set a tone. And it did that well. If I'm being honest, most of Zero Escape's music was like that: Listening to it on its own is kind of dull. But I didn't praise 999 for its great music. Well, I guess I did, but... I had to come up with 9 reasons, and I couldn't come up with anything better. I think that charging $6.99 for this soundtrack is an outrage, because I don't believe in paying for things.

There are a few other games that I spent a bit of time with. I attempted to play Castle Crashers with my friend, foolishly believing that it seemed like a game that could conceivably be handled with a keyboard. I was surprised to find that they A, B, X, and Y buttons on the Xbox controller actually corresponded to the A, B, X, and Y keys on the keyboard, at least for the menu. Here's a fun experiment. Try putting your fingers on all of those keys. Done? Congratulations! Now go call a chiropractor. You have arthritis.

I also played Bastion for a bit, but not really for long enough to learn anything other than the fact that the narrator's voice is top-tier, which I had already known. The gameplay seemed pretty fun, if a bit challenging. Not much else to say.

I'm kind of running out of Steam here, (Hah! Get it?) so I guess I'll just wrap this thing up now. My Steam account username is the same as my blogger pseudonym, (Havoc Mantis, in case you hadn't noticed) so feel free to find me, if you're hankering for the companionship of internet strangers.

Steamy Birthday Surprise

If you came here looking for disappointment, prepare to be disappointed. Despite my expectations to the contrary, it seems that I have kept my promise to update today. Rather than going through the hassle of half-assing this post on my birthday, (It's the only fraction of assing that I'm capable of) I have opted to first write a draft of it on the day before posting with pencil and paper, like some kind of barbarian. The reason for this primordial technology is that I am currently in a car, on a road trip from “Sick Ruckus” to “Good Morning”, and due to a nasty combination of poor planning on my part and short laptop battery life, I have nothing better to do than scrawl my ramblings in layered carbon like some kind of damn, dirty ape.

I suppose a title like that warrants some kind of explanation. You see, when a mommy and a daddy love each other very much, sometimes the only adequate method of expressing their love involves razors, lasers, tazers, or some combination of the-- huh? Oh, right. It probably warrants a relevant explanation. You see, for the longest time, I never used Steam. I didn't know how dates work, so I couldn't get my debit card to work, no matter how much I wiped it on my jeans. And perhaps I was a better man for not using Steam. I mean, just a scant few days ago I read a Cracked article about how the author would just buy games on Steam, despite knowing he would hardly play them. Of course, I'd never have to worry about something like that. What kind of chump buys things just for the sake of buying them? (SPOILER ALERT: It's me. It is a Havoc Mantis Type Chump©. But I also might have accepted “Girl type chump”, depending on how misogynistic the audience is that night.)

So, let me tell you about a Type Havocmantis Chump (Abbreviated to “THC” from here on out). As you may know, Steam's summer sale started on the 11^th, and it is certifiably insane. No jury would convict this sale. Almost everything in their entire library of games (a library dwarfed only by Alexandria's) is at least 50% off. In addition, daily sales and 8 hour flash sales cut prices even deeper.

So here we are, two days in, and I've bought 8 games for a princely sum of about $18. The first game I bought, the one domino set off the sinister chain reaction that toppled my psyche, was Recettear: An Item Shop's tale. My friend always seemed like he was having all kinds of fun with it, and he said it was on sale, so I decided to check it out. Near as I can tell, it's an RPG, except instead of being an adventurer, it tells the story of the person behind the counter: The owner of those item shops that heroes love to frequent. I think there might also be adventures to commit, because shopkeepers have to get their wares somehow, and the world isn't ready for a game about graverobbing (but I'm willing to wait). The plot seems fairly similar to Animal Crossing, where buying a place saddles you with an enormous debt that you must spend the game paying off, except that this time, [FUTURE ME HAS DECIDED AGAINST MAKING THE JOKE THAT USED TO BE HERE]

There was an image to go with the joke, but I deleted it. I still need an image to break up the paragraphs, though.

EDIT: Oh man. This game, you guys. It may not be on sale as hard as it used to be, but at $8, it's still a steal. This game combines all the cuteness of the word "yayifications" with all the intensity and fun of paying the rent on time. If this sounds at all like a game you'd like to play, I'd highly recommend it. It describes drinking alcohol as being "Not entirely dissimilar to attempting to drink a tree". It is fun times on all fronts.

And all of that for just 5 bucks. Next, I bought a pair of games I've never heard of. Why? Because they were just $0.50. For the pair. Just to really make sure that everyone is pickin' up what I'm puttin' out: I purchased two games, and it cost me less than a single chicken wing from Buffalo Wild wings. A chicken wing that is also on sale, mind you. To top it off, they're adventure games, (In the vein of 999, Ace Attorney, and everything else I've been playing of late) self-described as being “like books, only good”. The names of the games are “Ben there, Dan that” and “Time Gentlemen, Please!” Puns? Gentlemen? Time Travel? Niceties? Sign me up!

After that, it was kind of a haze, so I'm not sure what order everything else came in. All I know is that once the dust cleared, I found myself owning Scribblenauts Unlimited, Bastion, Cave Story+, Hotline Miami, and an as-of-yet unquenched thirst for more games. Of course, no matter how cheap these games might be now, they'll end up costing a pretty penny when I have to buy a computer that can actually play them.

If you intend to get in on this action, here are some tips from a man who has no business giving advice: First off, set aside a certain amount of money that you intent to spend on the summer sale, (Ends June 22^nd!) and when that money runs out, stop buying games. This should prevent you from snowballing out of control with your spending and waking up in a ditch to find that your molars have been sold on the black market. Unless that kind of stuff happens to you regardless of your money situation, in which case I'm afraid I can't help you.

On top of that, it pays to be patient. The 10 day blanket sale is punctuated by shorter, more precise sales that offer even greater savings. By holding off on jumping a game you want right out of the gate, you might be able to catch it during a daily or flash sale, and save even more money, which you can then spend on even more games.

And I think that's about all I have to say about my newfound addiction. But before I go, I'd just like to give a big birthday shout-out to Patrick Stewart, Harrison Ford, and some guy named Hunter whose last name I don't remember, but I remember he was born on the same day as me. Have a good one, guys!

Man. All of these paragraphs seemed a lot longer when they were written out in graphite. And to lengthen this one just the tiniest bit, I'll mention that this is the 42^nd post on this blog, and I'm sure you guys all know what that means.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to spend the rest of this car ride breeding Shroomish and having fun. And I'm all out of fun.

E3 Concluding Ramblings, No More Parts to Follow

See, I was expecting that once E3 had actually gotten underway, there would be a whole host of things for me to care about and discussed, but then I remembered that I'm not a gamer. In light of a new Super Smash Brothers, there is nothing else that I care about, or could possibly ever care about. So I guess I'll just start off with a neat little observation I made.

First of all, though, you should check out http://www.smashbros.com/us/, the new most important part of my morning ritual. Well, second to the blood sacrifice, of course. Not even Smash Bros can keep the voices at bay. Sorry for making such an obvious joke, but you know what they say: The truth is stranger than fiction. Anyway, if you click the button that says "Wii U & Nintendo 3DS Developer Direct", it'll take you to a video where the game's creator talks about some of the new characters, and how he plays the game, and you can't, and how much happier he is for it. I highly recommend that you watch it. But in the video, he says something interesting. He says that the Wii U version and the 3DS version will have "the same number of characters". Well, actually, he says something in Japanese, and then the translator says that. But you will note that he does not say that they will have the same characters. In addition, he explicitly says that some stages and other things will be different between between the two consoles. So, while it may just be a translation thing, it certainly seems possible that the two games will have different characters.

So what characters will be exclusive to which consoles? Well, I can't say for sure, but if you go to the pages for The Villager and the Wii Fit Trainer, (Hilariously called "Miss Fit" by some) you'll notice that they have no images from the 3DS game, only the Wii U. All other characters have screens from both, so it seems fairly likely to me that Miss Fit and The Villager will be Wii U exclusive.

And really, that's about all I have to say. Except that Gamefreak seems really insistent on normalizing all their Pokemon. I'm sure that, theoretically, a math joke could be made about that, but I'll just blame sickness for my inability to do that. Two Pokemon so far have been announced to have Normal and another type, which is stupid, because normal is supposed to be the type that Pokemon have when they're too lame to have any other type. I guess GameFreak just decided that what they had created was too derpy to not have a Normal type.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you... The New Bidoof!

But seriously, what the hell is it doing with its legs like that? Is it lying on the ground? Is that how it stands? I just cannot imagine how such a creature could come to be, outside of the imagination of a particularly mean-spirited Spore player.

Other than that, there's not much else to say. Everyone else has bitched plenty about Microsoft, so I don't really have anything to add. Kingdom Hearts III is something that my content manager certainly cares about, if not me. And everything seems quiet on the Hoenn front, which makes me a little nervous about how confidently I assured everyone that they were very definitely going to do a Ruby/Sapphire Remake. Perhaps they figured that after seeing the above monstrosity, no one would ever want to play Pokemon ever again.

E3 Initial Ramblings, More Parts to Follow

Did you watch both of those? No? That's too damn bad. Watch them now.

Thank you. Now that your tear ducts are empty and your diaphragm is enfeebled by your unrelenting sobs of joy, I hope that you still have the mental acuity to read this, though I really have nothing to say. Just... did you see all those brothers? Did you see what they were doing? They were smashing. And there was fire, and music, and Megaman. And it was good.

You could say that I've always been more of a Nintendo Fanboy than an actual gamer, so I will likely say little about the Xbox One and PS4, except that I don't care. Also, most of the rumors about used games and always online that surround the Xbox One are either exaggerations or outright fabrications. Does that make it a good console? Absolutely not.  But I think it takes a certain amount of egotism to think that Microsoft is really going to spy on your conversations through your Kinect. They really don't care about what you're saying. At worst, they'll have some computer analyze your conversation for certain keywords, then use it to target their advertising, which sounds pretty bad, but I never really saw the problem. Would you rather see advertisements for products you have no interest in? Why not just ignore them entirely, like you almost certainly do already?

Now that everyone who takes these things way too seriously has closed their browser window while muttering something about "sheeple", it's just us, the cool kids. Honestly, I'm not sure any of the things I'm talking about are even technically E3 news, but E3 started today, and Nintendo made a bunch of reveals, so I'm just going to consider it E3. Game Freak hasn't started their E3 conference yet, but they have let slip one major reveal: Fairy type.

Indeed, it is as the rumors foretold. There is indeed a new type, and it is "Fairy". Now, those Pokemaniacs out there with souls might notice that this is stupid. What is "Fairy Type" even supposed to mean? The currently announced fairy Pokemon are Marill, Jigglypuff, Sylveon, and Gardevoir. As you may have noticed, these Pokemon share nothing in common, flavor-wise. However, the damned among us, might just find this new type to our liking. You see, Fairy type is super effective against Dragon, and if it resists it as well, then there might just be something to stop Dragons from shitting all over everything. This could help stabilize the competitive battling metagame, and since competitive battling is all I care about anymore, I'm actually taking this surprisingly well.

Now that you've had a few minutes to recuperate, let's go back to Super Smash Brothers... I'm sorry. There's really nothing more to say. Next order of business...

Super Mario 3D World. As you probably guessed, it's for the Wii U, because "Land" clearly denotes portable games, and "World" clearly denotes console games. And if there's one thing that you can count on from Mario, it's consistency. In recent times, at least, they haven't really done much to change the formula, and it seems that they're sticking to the policy of "Just add a new powerup, screw it". And this new powerup is... some kind of cat suit? I can't say I like it. I might even hate it. But that's not important, because the idea of adding multiplayer to the formula of Super Mario 3D Land is intriguing to me. But, more importantly, the music. Give this a listen.

Mario Kart 8 was also announced, so let us all have a moment of silence for the laid off workers of Nintendo's Subtitle Division. The trailer didn't really reveal anything terribly notable, other than hovercars(?) and strange gravity antics, reminiscent of Super Mario Galaxy. I really liked Mario Kart Wii, (I guess we can trace the downfall of the Subtitle Division) so I'm sure I'll pick this up, but it's not enough to make me get a Wii U. However, I might make an exception if there's a Möbius Strip track.

As it turns out, I'm not quite finished talking about the New Smash Bros, because it seems that a trailer managed to escape my attention.

Honestly, I'm not terribly confident about this, but after seeing Kirby do yoga, it doesn't matter anymore. I was upset at first, but I just can't stay mad at Smash Bros, and I can't stay mad at Kirby faced with the painful reality that he doesn't even have legs, just feet that are attached to his torso.

Well, I guess it's time for me to sign off by acknowledging that you had no real reason to read this. But thanks for doing it anyway. There are many places out there with far more in-depth coverage of E3, and I had like, three jokes, tops, so this may have just been a waste of time. But since that's all this blog is meant to do, I guess you could call this post a success.

A Few of my Favorite Things: Video Games

Like a great poet once said, a blog truly is the window to a person’s soul. Read someone’s blog, and you can know the inner workings of their mind even more familiarly than the most intimate lover. And since I lack any of those, you have even less competition!

Since my blog is more or less an unrestricted periscope into my personality, it’s likely that I come across as quite a gamer. I spend unhealthy amounts of time on the internet, fancy myself smarter than I am, and have the audacity to think that people actually care about my opinion. These are all qualities common to both bloggers and gamers, so it only makes sense that I might spend large amounts of my time gaming. And during for the beautiful days of my life, I did. But then college happened, and I find myself with only just enough time to piss away on the internet. I’ve managed to play a few games in the past year, but more than half of the games bought last year were Christmas presents for other people. Whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing, I genuinely do not know. Anyway, since this is a list, I guess I should get to listin’:

5. Pokemon Conquest

Like Pokemon Mystery Dungeon before it, Pokemon Conquest was a Pokemon crossover with a Japanese-exclusive series that promised actual Pokemon combat. Also like PMD, it disappointed me in its dissimilarity to Fire Emblem. While it was a Turn-based Strategy, unlike PMD, (I don’t really know how I’d classify PMD, other than “shameful”) it was more similar to the Final Fantasy Tactics series. But I love the Final Fantasy Tactics series, almost as much as I love Fire Emblem, so what was the problem? Well, Whenever I have a mental debate over whether I like Fire Emblem or Tactics more* (This is a shockingly common occurrence  and my number one cause of [insert joke during proofreading]). What I decided is that, of my two favorite TBS RPGs, I prefer Fire Emblem’s tactical gameplay, but FFT has superior role-playing mechanics . This is hardly the place to talk about this at length, but Pokemon Conquest sorely lacks the level of customization provided by FFT, as well as the tactical challenge of Fire Emblem. This leaves one great, unanswered question: “Why the hell did I put this on a list of my favorite games, if it was such a disappointment?” I guess I could go the route of Time Magazine, and say that this is a list of games of great significance, rather than ones that are actually good. But it says “My Favorite Things”, so that’s obviously a handwave. I guess I’ll just say that the fact that I had to pad this list with a game I didn’t really like is indicative of how few games I played this year.

4. Assassin’s Creed 3

Special Blogspot Note: Pictures of Assassin's Creed 3 can go straight to hell. For some reason, this is the second picture in a row that won't properly load. I doubt I will fix this any time soon, because I think it's funny that I just told pictures to go straight to hell.

Speaking of games that were obviously added to pad the list: I haven’t actually played this game. You see, I was pretty into the Assassin’s Creed series at first, but when they couldn’t be bothered to put numbers in the titles, I couldn’t be bothered to follow along. And now I’m afraid to jump back in without catching up, and I’m not sure I have the time to do that. Because I haven’t played it, I really don’t have much to say. The first two Assassin’s Creeds were super fun, (The moment I realized that you could kill someone by throwing them into a scaffolding remains one of the top moments of my life. It was also pretty fun in the game.) and people are saying good things about the fifth, so I bet Assassin’s Creed III would be right up my alley. So if you find yourself with a hot copy of this game, and you don’t know someone who can keep a secret, you could always pitch it to me.

3. Pokemon White 2 (And also Black 2, I guess)

For the second time on this list, I have a Pokemon game, and this time, it’s one I actually liked! Well, it was OK, anyway. After the near death experience of buying Pokemon White 2, (I almost bought Pokemon Black 2. The cashier had it all ringed up, and I freaked out as I realized my mistake at the last minute.) I didn’t care to finish this sentence. My feelings on the fact that they opted to make Black and White 2, rather than a singular “Grey”, were conflicted. On one hand, it was an obvious cash-grab, and that’s not something I like. But on the other side of the coin, the fact that it was a true sequel, taking place 2 years later, meant that they could have a completely new story, and the story was one of my favorite parts of the original Black and White. Pokemon games usually aren’t known for their story, (You want to be the very best, like no one ever was. Ect.) but Black and White brought up the complicated moral implications that Pokemon had always skirted around. When the names were announced, many of the more unsavory internet folk replied with “Blakc? Wihte? Dat’s racist! lolololol”. I never would have guessed how close they were to making sense, as the story of Team Plasma’s attempted Pokemon revolution mirrors our own civil rights movement, with the Player Character and the mysterious villain N acting as analogues for Dr. Martin Luther King Junior and Malcolm X, respectively. While I am somewhat serious about  the previous comparison, It’d probably be better for my policy of political neutrality if you just assumed that it was a meaningless joke.

But this post isn’t about the original Black and White. It’s about 2. And the problem is that the story, the one thing I looked forward to most, just wasn’t as good. While it was satisfying to see how the region had changed in the two years between games, with all the little shout-outs to continuity, (I eat that shit up) the lack of a morally ambiguous villain made it bland. The best bad guys are often the ones that you’re almost kind of rooting for, and that absolutely did not happen here. But, despite all that, it was still a Pokemon game, so I had to buy it, I had to play it, and I had to enjoy it. And I did. Also, it had a bunch of different versions of the amazing “Team Plasma Battle” song, so that was neat.

2. Katawa Shoujo

Oh boy. Here we go. Well, since my number 1 video game is basically a visual novel, there’s precedent. And that means that I would be a hypocrite if I didn’t include this. If 4leaf studios could have only rushed this out 5 days earlier, I would have been spared this humiliation…

Katawa Shoujo is a visual novel made by weeaboos on 4chan. The title translates into English as “Cripple Girls”, more or less. As much I’d like to leave it at that, I feel like I should explain myself. Katawa Shoujo is a piece of interactive fiction in which you take control of Hisao, a teenager with a major heart defect, as he has sex with 5 different girls, each crippled by a distinct disability. And now that I’ve got this fat check from the “Research on the absolute minimum amount of respect one human can have for another Institute”, let’s see if I can salvage some of my dignity. Despite having a premise exactly like the kind you’d expect from a place like 4chan, it’s a very touching story about LOVE and COMPANIONSHIP. The fact that there are naked bodies, (which one can choose to censor out, I feel compelled to add) is secondary. Or even tertiary, if you listen to the great soundtrack. If you’re the kind of person that didn’t have to Google what a “visual novel” is, then I guess I’d recommend it to you. Bring some tissues. What you do with them is entirely up to you. 

1. Zero Escape: Virtue’s Last Reward

This shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise, considering the post I made fawning over the first game in the series, which ended with the statement that this game is better in most ways. I spilled a lot of electrons on the subject there, so there’s not much else to say, since the two games share a lot of the same strengths. I guess I’ll parrot what GameInformer said of it, and say that VLR makes you feel like you’re interacting with actual people, in a way that few games manage. Much of the game revolves around the “Ambidex Game”, a game in which players must choose to ally or betray in order to get enough points to escape. The game is based off the Prisoner’s Dilemma, and carries all the moral and ethical ramification’s entailed. It also has some of the best voice acting I’ve ever heard from a video game, with Zero III doing a particularly great job.

As much as I recommend this game, however, I STRONGLY advise against playing it before you’ve played Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors. It spoils much of 999, and some of the big moments lose their edge if you don’t have the context of the first game (I continue to eat that shit up). And if you needed a more heartfelt endorsement  look no further: I love this game so much that my avatar, my very ambassador to the internet, the land I love so much, is a character from this game. Assuming, that is, that it’s still a surprised looking robot man at the time you’re reading this.

Conclusion:

And there you have it! I’ve somehow managed to spin a dry year of gaming into one of my famous Havoc Mantis walls of text. I guess that procrastinating job applications gets the creative juices flowing in a way few other things can. I can only pray that if my mother ever does read this, it’s far enough into the future that she doesn’t care.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The whole thing about “Insert a joke while proofreading” was left there on purpose. It was a joke, and not at all indicative of me not proofreading my posts, because proofreading is totally a thing that I do.

*I realize that I totally left that sentence hanging, but I’m not really sure how to fix it, so I’m just going to take the easy way out and lampshade it.